Some Facebook Social Readers Start Dropping Rapidly

Some Facebook Social Readers are dropping at a rapid pace. Publications such as The Guardian UK and The Washington Post are seeing their social readers drop in traffic at a rapid pace because users are abandoning the tools. The Washington Post grew their social reader to almost 18 million users last month, but now they are at 9.2 million.
In the second week of April The Washington Post social reader was getting more than 4 million daily users, but ended up almost near zero for most of the rest of the month. Today they are at around 220,000 daily users.

The DailyMotion Social Reader dropped from a high of 3.5 million in early April to about 670,000 today. The Guardian topped at nearly 6 million monthly average users and was still at 5.5 million last week. Now they have fallen to 3.9 million monthly average users.

“Social readers always seemed a little too share-y, even for Facebook,” said BuzzFeed. “They felt more like the kind of cold, descriptive, invisible, and yet mandatory services we’re used to seeing from Google rather than the genuinely new and useful tools for spreading information. And they feel, I don’t know, kind of broken right now?”